RELATIONS OF NEW TESTAMENT SCIENCE 579 



Gfrorer, already lifted to a plane of superb scholarship by Schiirer, 

 should be still further advanced by Bousset's Religion des Juden- 

 thums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (1902), and that the ensuing 

 year, the year just past, should see the issue by Bousset and Gunkel 

 of a series of Forschungen zur Religion und L/iteratur des Alien und 

 Neuen Testaments, beginning with Gunkel 's demonstration, not in a 

 spirit of depreciation, but as an evidence of its vitality and adapt- 

 ation to the function of a world-religion, of the syncretistic origin 

 of Christianity. His monograph is well entitled: Zum religionsge- 

 schichtlichen Verstdndnis des Neuen Testaments. 



I must deal briefly with the question of the distinctive vital factor 

 in the gospel of Paul, of Peter, of Jesus. It is more nearly related 

 to the subject of my colleague, Professor Burton, than to mine. 



The stride from the relatively simple Gospel of Peter, reflected in 

 substance by the Synoptists, to the Gospel of Paul, is a prodigious 

 one; so great that the Greek churches, indoctrinated in Paul's 

 speculative, mystical presentation of the spiritual Christ, with in- 

 tentional subordination of the historic Jesus, might well have been 

 expected to go the way of the Gnostic theosophists, or Marcion, out- 

 Pauling Paul, separating from the Palestinian mother-church, 

 where emphasis was laid rather upon historic tradition and the nova 

 lex. The fact that Christian theology advanced rather upon a new 

 plane of higher unity, doing justice to both Semitic and Hellenic 

 conceptions, is due to the inspired genius who brings forth at Ephesus, 

 centre of the Pauline Greek church, the so-called Johannine literature. 

 In the Epistles and Gospel of John true Paulinism reacts against 

 the ultra-Hellenistic tendencies, combining his higher Christology, his 

 mysticism, and his rapidly Hellenizing eschatology with a determined 

 hold upon the historic manifestation of the Logos "in the flesh" 

 and insistence upon the new-old Commandment of Love. The 

 Johannine literature represents Christianity in its twofold develop- 

 ment from the Petrine and from the Pauline type. It takes the via 

 media of historic tradition and ethical earnestness, combined with 

 freedom and spirituality of interpretation; while on either flank are 

 seen the extremes of Ebionite reaction and Gnostic syncretizing 

 theosophy. 



The Petrine, the Pauline, and the Johannine transitions all repre- 

 sent great strides of religious thought; too great for our compre- 

 hension if we forget the conditions of the age, and fail to realize 

 that what Peter, what Paul, what the Johannine writer, furnished, 

 was not the elements, but the pole of condensation; not the predi- 

 cates, but the unifying subject. The age was the world's transition 

 from national to world-religions, an age of the interfusion of Orient 

 and Occident. It held the elements of new racial types of thought 

 and aspiration, new conceptions of the world-order, new aspirations 



